Planning and assessment of a workshop on undergraduate education in biometric systems

Biometrics is the science of recognizing and authenticating people using their physiological features. The global biometrics market has a compound annual growth rate of 21.3 percent. There is much research interest in different biometric systems, which has led to increasing efforts in ensuring that biometrics is taught at the undergraduate level. The authors are in the final year of an NSF TUES Type 2 grant that is based on the theme of vertically integrating biometrics experiments throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Three universities have joined together in this effort. This paper describes the planning and assessment of a 3 day workshop that is based on the NSF funded effort. Fifteen faculty from across the country participated in this workshop. Undergraduate and graduate students also attended. The key points of the workshop included invited lectures and hands-on laboratory activities. The invited lectures included a tutorial on biometrics, detailed lectures on speaker recognition and a lecture on how to assess an educational intervention. The hands-on activities were presented such that the attending faculty could take them back to their respective universities. The workshop assessment results are very positive with respect to organization, quality of the invited lectures, quality of the handson activities and the social program.